Thoughts on the military and military activities of a diverse nature. Free-ranging and eclectic.

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Paratroopers!

This is coolbert:

Again from the latest DEBKAfile newsletter we have a description of an Israeli paratrooper exercise gone awry. NOT proceeding to plan and a number to troops having jumped and been injured:

"July 25, 2013: • Training jumps in heavy cloud leave 23 Israeli paratroops slightly injured
In
a paratroop brigade exercise carried out before dawn Thursday near
Kibbutz Revivim in the Negev in heavy cloud, one-third of the 1,100
participants didn’t get to jump. Eighteen who did were slightly hurt and
carried on with the exercise and five were taken to hospital. These figures are par for this type of a nocturnal paratroop drill."

"These figures are par for this type of a nocturnal paratroop drill"NOT only for a nocturnal [night] drill but any sort of paratrooper drill.

Even during peacetime and even when conditions for a paratroop drop are ideal, unquestionably so, injuries are quite common. AND as you might well expect, wartime parachute drops that rate of injury even higher, perhaps beyond expected or norm.

AND contrary to popular belief no amount of physical conditioning or training can mitigate the injury rate from a mass paratroop drop. This is well understood but never enunciated as such!!

AND in contrast to a lightly loaded civilian skydiver, a paratrooper when jumping does so with a full combat load and sometimes way beyond that, the landing and stress on the joints of the body most exacerbated, that chance of injury much increased.

Consider ONLY from the Sicilian operation of World War Two [WW2], allied paratrooper and air landing forces experiencing calamity on a number of occasions. Those most highly trained and most highly motivated of all infantry facing obstacles hard to overcome.

Thanks to: "AFTER THE BATTLE" Number # 77 "THE INVASION OF SICILY" by Karel Margry

"The Allied airborne assaults preceding the landings met with great difficulties. As unexpected gale over the Mediterranean and had bad visibility broke up the aerial columns flying from North Africa and caused the inexperienced pilot to lose their way."

English and American paratrooper and air landing contingents without resolution experiencing problems in some cases of a calamitous nature and this occurring a number of times:

1. "Of 144 gliders carrying British 1st Air landing Brigade in Sicily, some 60 were released too early and landed in the sea, with most of the men drowning. Only 54 arrived in Sicily a mere 12 of them on or near the correct landing zones. As a result less than 100 British airborne troops reached the objective."

2., "The 222 C-47's carrying 3,400 men of the 505th Parachute Infantry [American] and the attached 3rd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry [American], dropped their loads all over south-eastern Sicily - - 33 sticks landing in the Eighth Army [British] area."

3. "despite assurances that they would not be fired upon by friendly forces if they flew the prescribed route, the aerial convoy carrying the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment [American] to Sicily was shot to pieces by Allied naval flak. The 2,000 paratroopers were to be dropped as reinforcement into the Gela Bridgehead. Of 144 C-47's, 23 were lost and 37 severely damaged. In all, 63 crewmen died. Paratroop casualties were 83 killed, 133 wounded and 16 missing."

4. "The night before [13 July] . . . [the] British 1st Parachute Brigade had dropped around the Ponte Primosole bridge . . . The Primosole operation was the fourth Allied airborne debacle in Sicily. Fired on by friendly naval vessels and heavy enemy flak along the coast, the troop carriers completely lost formation. Of 126 paratrooper planes, only 39 dropped their loads within a mile of the DZ's. Of the 19 gliders, only four landed near the bridge. of a total of 1,856, only 295 men reached the objective"

German paratroopers also having parachute assaults in a reinforcing role during the battle for Sicily, air drops somewhat more accurate and with much less poor results. Even described as TEXTBOOK:

5. "On the evening of July 12, the first contingent, Fallschirmjager-Regiment 3, made a textbook drop south of Catania"

6. On the night of July 16-17 . . . The German positions were bolstered too by the arrival of Fallschirmjager-Regiment 4 which had jumped that evening."

Parachutists of the Rhodesian military an integral component of the Fire Force concept during the Rhodesian Bush war many troops having made dozens of combat jumps, their injury rate was what exactly? Devoted readers to the blog have an answer to this?